Gambiel had found nothing of the ’cycler. So they had only the food in their pockets, unless Krater’s hunt was successful, or they figured out a way to bring down an adult Bandersnatch, or found a clutch of fresh buds.
“You want to try making a fire with that laser?” Cuiller asked.
“Burning what?”
“How much of a wedge do you think you could cut out of one of these trunks without knocking it down?”
“That’s green, sappy wood…give off a lot of smoke.”
“We can stand it. None of us is going to smell too good in a day or two.”
“I was thinking of our white friends. They might be sensitive to fire under the canopy.”
“You’re right. I—”
The sound was on them before they could hear it: the rippling crackle of tortured atmosphere parting before a heavy body traveling faster than air molecules knew how to move. What they consciously heard was the clap of a sonic boom—the air moving back in the wake of whatever had snapped it apart—followed by echoes of that first, searing push against the atmosphere.
Cuiller looked up, expecting to see a contrail in the sky and finding only the green gloom of the canopy above them.
“That was a ship,” Gambiel said. “In a hurry, too.”
“Of course. Have any idea what kind?”
“I didn’t hear any reaction thrusters. They could be on gravity polarizers.”
“And this close to the Patriarchy’s back door…Can kzinti detect a General Products hull at long range?”
“The same way we go about finding a stasis-box,” Gambiel said. “Keep probing with deep radar and study the return images. Our hull comes up cloudier than a Slaver box, but still defined.”
“Ouch! Let’s get up into the trees.”
“What about these?” Gambiel pointed to the hoarded supplies.
“You take the batteries and medicines. I’ll take the circuit chips. Leave the scraps—no one’s going to eat them.”
The Jinxian began filling his pockets.
“Captain, what was that?” Jook called on the radio. “Company. Daff and I are coming up to join you. Stay put and—until we know more—stay off the radio.”
In reply, Jook keyed the transmit twice. Two low bursts of static that could be read as “Aye-aye.”
Cuiller nodded silently at Jook’s quick and tactful thinking.
“The kzinti won’t be out of their ionization envelope yet,” Gambiel observed. “They can’t hear our radio transmissions yet.”
“Still…” Cuiller took out his grapple and launcher, hooked up a line cassette, and took aim overhead. “When we get up there, Daff, go as high as you can. You’re our best at identifying kzinti ships by their silhouette. See if you can spot and evaluate the newcomers.”
“Do my best.”
They fired their grapples and swung up through the leaves, As soon as Gambiel was stabilized on a limb near his grapple, he released it, aimed higher, shot, and slithered away after it. Cuiller surveyed the local jungle. Radio would carry to the kzinti, but not voice.
“Hugh!…Sally!” he shouted.
Cuiller looked around, parting clusters of flat leaves to stare into the next meter-wide pocket of air. He called again, stepped over to another branch, recovered and reshot his grapple, and swung on a short arc toward where he thought his navigator and communications officer had gone up.
“Sally!…”
“Captain, you’re scaring the game.” It was Krater’s voice, but she was invisible, screened by the foliage.
“Belay the hunting, we’ve got visitors.”
“I know. If you keep shouting like that, you’ll scare them, too.”
“Well, just hang on, because—”
“Heads up, everybody! Coming through!” Small and distant, Gambiel’s voice drifted down to them. It was followed immediately by the groan of branches being forced aside—much like the first passage Callisto had made through the treetops—accompanied by the sizzle of wet leaves burning. Cuiller could smell hot iron and dying vegetation.
The question was, where would the mass of the ship come down? If it was right over their heads, they’d never have time to get out of its way before the kzinti ship knocked them loose and crushed them among the collapsing vines and branches. But if it was coming off to one side or another, then any step might move them to safety—or take them into the line of trouble. No way to know…
“Hang on!” Cuiller called out, and braced himself.
The wall of leaves that defined the edge of his vision bulged inward and then dissolved in a golden tracery of sparks and incandescent veins. Beneath the fire was the scorching flank of a kzinti warship. Cuiller thought at first it was red-hot metal—or some ceramic, equally heated. Then, from the uniform coloring, he guessed the hemispheric section was simply painted red. It disappeared below before he had a chance to make up his mind. His one glance left the impression of a globular hull. From its chord, it seemed small. He guessed it was only fifteen or twenty meters in diameter. Then the gap in the trees closed on a blackened twist of branch and a fume of smoke.
Cuiller reset his grapple and lowered himself into the feathery bottom layer of the canopy to watch the kzinti ship land. From the whirr of winding motors that came to him through the leaves, he knew the rest of his crew had the same idea.
At this close range, the Leaf-Eaters’ special hull showed clearly on a radar scanner working at normal intensities. The spindle gleamed and sparkled under the weakly graded return of the foliage layer covering the planet that Navigator said was chart reference KZ-5-1010. Nyawk-Captain made an estimate of the hull’s size—more than 200 cubits in length—and, from this, confirmed the vessel type with Weaponsmaster.
Nyawk-Captain piloted an entry through the green layer, sliding among the interlaced branches and through the nets of vine. He counted on the residual heat in Paw’s hull to burn through, where the gravity polarizer could not break through, the entangling vegetation.
He wanted to place his ship at visual inspection distance from the strange hull. Among these closely spaced tree trunks, that meant landing practically on top of it—too near for evasive maneuvers. Cat’s Paw went down with every weapon fully charged, ready, and aimed. Yet his greatest weapon against the Leaf-Eater hulls, Nyawk-Captain knew, would be the gravity polarizer itself. At the first sign of hostility, he would use an acceleration forty times the pull of the kzinti homeworld to stomp anything inside that ship into paste.
When the last branches between him and the enemy ship had burned away, Nyawk-Captain focused his optics. The first thing his eyes registered were holes in the hull material. Then scrapings on its surface and the litter of metal pieces all around it. Finally, the trees that bent under its weight and the odd angle at which it lay among them. All of this, plus the total lack of reaction to his coming, gave Nyawk-Captain pause.
It was a dead ship, certainly. But how recently dead? And had its crew died in the accident that made it dead?
Given the Patriarchy’s reports on the indestructibility of the Leaf-Eater hulls, this vessel might have been killed many years and light-years from this spot, could have drifted over the distance of time and space and entered the planet’s atmosphere as unguided as a meteor, crashing among these trees. But then, Nyawk-Captain would expect some kind of cratering around the ship and more damage to the surrounding forest.
It might also have landed here long ago, and then the crew had suffered some accident. The ship would have deteriorated—all but the indestructible hull—under the force of time. But how would this version account for the trees crushed under the bows?
No, to tell the full story, he needed a personal reconnaissance of the derelict.
“Navigator, break out full body armor for both of us,” he ordered. “Weaponsmaster, you stay at post. Destroy any danger that may approach. We will neutralize this threat—if any threat remains here—before going on to take our prize.” The two crew members growled assent and went about
their tasks.
Body armor came in a single articulated piece, like a hinged kzinti skin. It fitted solidly across the back, double-folded at the sides, and clasped with a tight seam up the belly. It was not designed as an environment suit, however, and covered only the backs and outer periphery of the arms, the fronts and sides of the legs. The attack surfaces. By rolling into a fetal crouch, a kzin wearing this armor could make himself practically invulnerable. The substructure was hardened steel, the surface an ablative material that would shed a ballistic slug or energy beam with equal facility. Of course, in that curled position, it could still be blown apart by explosives or melted with sufficient heat. But what kzin would crouch and wait that long, when he could fight?
Powered joints and solenoid-driven claws—connected to the kzin’s own muscles with feedback pads—increased the wearer’s strength and speed fivefold. The helmet’s visor was fitted with devices that increased the senses of sight, hearing, and smell; offered an air mask to protect against poison gases, dusts and pollens; and connected the wearer with his companions through laser and electromagnetic telemetry and communications.
The body armor offered wonderful enhancements for a warrior—at the cost of two disadvantages. Donning it, inside the cramped spaces of a Scream of Vengeance-class interceptor, required the skills of an acrobat. Maneuvering it into and through the ship’s tiny airlock required those same acrobatics combined with insufferable patience.
But, once he got his head into the open air, Nyawk-Captain hardly needed the helmet’s filter enhancements to answer his earlier questions. His head swam with the scent of a dozen different long-chain polymers, dissolved into organic soup. He knocked the filters’ sensitivity back three notches and took shallow breaths.
While Navigator finished his contortions and cycled the lock, Nyawk-Captain approached the abandoned hulk. His eyes quickly adjusted to the forest gloom and began noting details: the position of various metal pieces, the indentations they left in the ground, other impressions. As he moved toward the hull, another complex scent came up, fainter than the scream of broken plastics. Dirt, sweat, pheromones…
Humans! The ship had come here under a human crew. But Nyawk-Captain could smell no blood. So whatever had become of them, the crew had clearly survived the crash. He bent toward one of the marks in the ground and sniffed it. The odors clung to it, a human footprint.
Employing the suit’s visual enhancers, Nyawk-Captain traced others of these marks. All of them had a certain formal similarity, just as all kzinti paws were made to the same design. But there were variations in the size and depth of the impressions. He counted four separate sets of these prints, matching them with their right and left curves.
“What do you—?” Navigator began as he came up.
“Stay back!” Nyawk-Captain waved him away.
Placing his own pads carefully, he walked in circles, tracking each pair of prints. They moved back and forth over the crash site, now pausing and sinking fractionally into the hardened forest floor, now skimming and scuffing lightly over the dirt. Eventually, however, each track ended abruptly—a digging in with the toes, and then gone. Nyawk-Captain looked up, up, into the treetops. He knew little enough about human physiology, but he could guess that not even the sons of Hanuman could make such a leap. But where else, then, would they be?
“This is an empty hole, My Captain,” Navigator observed.
“But not too long empty. I can still smell them.”
“Yes, but what of it? This ship—the only hard contact in this system—cannot interfere with us. We have nothing to fear from naked humans, wherever they may have gone. We should immediately retrieve the Thrintun artifact and then leave here.”
“Well reasoned, Navigator, if not properly expressed for your superior officer’s ears. We still have the question of what could have caused such damage to this hull.”
“An academic inquiry, at best.”
“Perhaps. Still, we shall—”
The sound came softly at first, through the aural enhancers. Nyawk-Captain thought it might be the creep of the forest floor under thermal stresses. Standing among the lattice pattern of upright trunks, he could not at first place it. He swiveled his helmet to scan the background.
“Weapons—!” he tongued the comm switch, then let the call die in his throat. A gliding white shape, easily three or four times the bulk of his ship, had loomed behind and settled over Cat’s Paw. Its flesh would be blocking Nyawk-Captain’s radio pulse. And besides, Weaponsmaster should already be aware of his predicament.
“Best we find cover,” he told Navigator.
“Where?”
“In here,” Nyawk-Captain replied, and sprang toward the nearest kzin-sized hole in the Leaf-Eater hull.
They crouched against the inside curve of the spindle, gasping in the waves of resinous vapor that assailed their noses until they could fasten their masks. At the same time, the carborundum claws extruding from their armored feet tried for purchase on the slick surface in an effort to keep them from slipping into the fuming liquid that sloshed in the bilges. Through a scar in the alien hull’s outer coating, Nyawk-Captain watched the white mass writhing over his ship. He briefly caught the flash of a hard, crystalline edge under the Whitefood’s bulk. Something dripped off that edge.
Whatever Weaponsmaster decided to do, it were best he acted quickly. Nyawk-Captain was beginning to understand what processes had eaten away everything but the hull of this human ship.
Suddenly, the huge pale body trembled, bulged upward—then blossomed outward in a mist of blood. Bright, red drops of it coalesced on the transparent surface through which Nyawk-Captain was looking. These were followed by strings and streamers of red flesh that slid and fell out of the blood cloud.
When the dripping and pattering of raw flesh stopped, Nyawk-Captain and Navigator climbed out of their hiding place. The stench of organic chemicals had disappeared in the aroma of fresh, warm meat. Navigator swung up his visor and mask, pulled a gooey strand off the outside of the Leaf-Eater hull, and sucked it off his fingers.
“Delicious!”
Nyawk-Captain, who had been studying the flank of Cat’s Paw which emerged from the garland of meat and bones, stopped to try his own taste. After weeks of eating reconstituted meat and artificial proteins, the flavor was wonderful. Delicate, like grik-grik caught in mid-spring, so that the first flush of adrenaline barely touched it. Satisfying, like a haunch of oolerg that had been fed on grain and then run until the acids of fatigue had fully flavored the meat. Sweet as…It was, Nyawk-Captain decided, whatever flavor he wanted it to be. That was how the Whitefoods had been engineered to taste.
“Enough. We waste time,” he told Navigator, then switched to the comm link. “Weaponsmaster? That was quick—”
“I abase myself, Nyawk-Captain!”
“Explain.”
“In dislodging the Whitefood, I used too much force for proximity to such an inert mass. I have damaged our ship.”
“Catalog the damages.”
“Primary and secondary lifting plates, short-range weapons, long-range communications, navigational and sensory antennas.”
“Can you effect repairs?”
“Eventually, if we carry the right spares.”
“Can you defend against another attack by the Whitefoods?”
“With warning—and I shall guard against their approach—the long-range weapons should be more than effective.”
“Begin working on the ship, then. Navigator will assist you. Out.”
“And what will you be doing while we repair the ship?” Navigator asked in a tone that bordered on insolence. “Sir.”
“I will go after the Thrintun box.”
“Yes, the box. That most important box. For which you have jeopardized our mission and put at risk an entire kzinti fleet!”
Nyawk-Captain felt his armor turning, almost of its own volition, to face this errant crew member. It was bending to assume a defensive crouch, conforming
to his will almost without conscious command. “Do you have more to say?” he asked stiffly, fully expecting a shrill scream of challenge.
“No, Nyawk-Captain.”
“Then understand this. If we are late for the rendezvous, all three of us will be whistling vacuum—unless we have a suitable peace offering for Admiral Lehruff. That box is now our life. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Nyawk-Captain.”
“Good. You should start on your work. The ship must be ready to lift by the time I return.”
The chastened kzin began the process of climbing in through the airlock.
Nyawk-Captain tongued his comm switch. “Weaponsmaster. Give me bearing and range to the second hardsight contact.”
“Those systems are currently inoperative, sir.”
“Curse it,” Nyawk-Captain said mildly. “Can you rig a hand-held unit?”
“I can modify a ranging sight.”
“Do so at once, and pass it through the airlock.”
“Yes, sir, but I cannot guarantee its accuracy within a thousand cubits.”
“It need only give the container’s general direction and a sense of its proximity.”
“You will have that, at least, sir.”
While he waited for the new tool, Nyawk-Captain used the suit’s claw to cut fillets from the ring of blasted meat girdling Cat’s Paw.
Watching from his hanging point in the forest canopy, Cuiller almost cheered when the Bandersnatch slid over the dome of the kzinti ship. And he blinked back tears of rage mixed with envy when the kzinti weapons blew the creature apart. There, but for the few milliseconds that had padded Jook’s reaction time, might stand Callisto, ready to fly.
Cuiller noted that one kzin remained on guard outside the ship, clad in efficient-looking armor, while the other returned inside on some business. Then the first retrieved something through the hatch and headed off through the trees.
Although Cuiller’s sense of direction had suffered somewhat from remaining suspended in his spider harness, twisting among the branches, for almost an hour, he had no doubt what heading the kzin was taking. The Patriarchy possessed its own form of deep radar.